I suppose everyone has “defining moments” in their life. These are moments – and they may not last more than a second or two – when you realize there are other things in life: you are open to change, to new ideas perhaps.
My first one came when I was 13 or 14, when an essay we were set to read and analyze at school had an image of a rainbow in it, as a symbol of “a better life”. That hit me: What is a better life? I didn’t know! And what’s more, I knew I didn’t know.
The second one was a few years later on, in my last year at school. I was doing sciences for university entrance, but as Head Girl (school captain) I shared a common room with the prefects, most of whom were doing English. A book of poetry had been left open on a table, and I read, Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are…
Suddenly, as I read that song of John Donne’s, I knew, clearly, and without a shadow of doubt, that another world, or worlds – other realms and realities – existed. And therefore all I had to do was go find it, or them.
Well, easier said than done. You can’t do much about finding “other worlds” at school. Except that I began to join things, to see what other people – men especially – thought about “other worlds”. At an all-girls school in the ’fifties you didn’t have a chance of meeting any men, so I began to spend time I should have been studying at local clubs and societies – to meet guys of my age, and to find out what they thought about this business of “other realms”. Also, as soon as I’d left school, I’d assumed that sex would lead me into and teach me about “other realms” – but after a while, a year or three I suppose, I realized it hadn’t. Sex was not the Answer to All Things. In fact I was even more confused. I was as far from finding out anything about “other worlds” as ever.
A third defining moment came when my then boy-friend, Derek Flower, who was an architectural student, handed me a flyer for some lectures. “This looks like your kind of thing, Jennie” he said, “I can’t go, but why don’t you?” It was for a series of lectures beginning on 8th March 1954 (that date has stuck in my mind ever since) and called, I think, “Man’s Place in the Universe” and the lecturer was a John G. Bennett. I was 20 years old, and already fed up with all the other things – umpteen clubs, churches, and groups galore – that I had encountered in my fruitless search for other worlds. Unlike other political, religious, and spiritual ‘authorities’ I had come across, Bennett was the first person I had ever met who seemed entirely honest. He also had a mysterious quality of inner strength that drew me to him – and to the psychological work he was teaching.
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Defining Moments
The Gurdjieff Work
Jungian Psychology
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Subud
The Metaphysic – an Ancient Indonesian Cosmology
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